Anatomy of a Scholarly Article

Introduction

You are currently in the module on "Anatomy of a Scholarly Article" in a larger tutorial. Each research tutorial includes modules of topics related to the overall tutorial learning objectives. Please go through all the pages in this module by clicking on the “Next” button on the bottom of the page in order to progress. If you would like to track your progress, be sure to log in with your UNCG credentials at the top right of the module. Each module includes Quick Checks on every page. These Quick Checks do not produce a certificate; they are optional and do not track your progress. Certificates are created by completing a whole tutorial, so be sure to complete all the modules within a tutorial in order to generate a certificate. You can also take a screenshot of your progress page. 

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Learning Objectives: By the time you complete this lesson, you should be able to:

  • Identify a scholarly article based on forma
  • Identify the most common parts of a scholarly article
  • Understand which format indicators lend to the credibility of the source

Many of your professors will require you to use scholarly articles to complete your assignments.  Since the amount of information available at your fingertips is growing exponentially, understanding how scholar’s format their articles can help you quickly evaluate sources and know if they are worth reading further.

Although there is variation among the different subjects, most scholarly articles consists of the following sections or headings: title and authors; abstract; introduction; methods; charts, graphs, and equations; results; conclusions; disucssion; references. 

Machine Readable PDF of "Anatomy of a Scholarly Article" Infographic

This tutorial will take you through sections that are typically found within scholarly journal articles. These sections can typically be identified by the heading at the start of the paragraph.

Not every article will contain every single section, but most scholarly works will have many of the headings discussed.

You may already know more about identifying scholarly articles than you think, watch this NC State video to find out what.

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